Black geometric mandala armband tattoo with dotted borders on an upper arm, worn beneath a white top and gold pendant necklace.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala armband tattoo on an upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black mandala design sits in a band around the upper arm, with a row of fine dots and a thin line above a half-mandala of curved petals and scrolls. A small teardrop shape hangs below the central motif. The image is in black ink only, with a light background of a white top and a gold necklace, and the design fills the centre of the frame.

Geometric Dotwork Upper arm Mandala Dot Armband Scroll Teardrop Line

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kettle has frozen in the pump house again, so you carry the bucket up the lane with the sky still the colour of wet slate. Your father used to say the ground keeps its own counsel in January. Overnight the frost has drawn ferns across the byre window, curling in half-circles like the lace on your grandmother's sideboard, and you stop to breathe on the glass so you can see the pen beyond.

Keep reading

Inside, the ewe called Tansy has been down since midnight. You kneel in the straw with the lantern hooked on a nail, and the light catches the rows of nail heads in the boards, a fine spill of dots like salt across the floor. Your fingers have gone past feeling. You work by touch, the way your mother showed you, slow and patient, and when the lamb finally comes it lies grey and unmoving in the straw.

You rub it hard with a handful of hay and blow across its face, and nothing happens. Outside, meltwater gathers at the lip of the gutter, swells to a single bead, and hangs there longer than seems possible before it lets go. You watch it, counting, and on the fourth breath the lamb shakes its head and sneezes straw into the lantern glow.

You sit back on your heels as the window begins to scallop with the first grey light. Tansy noses at her new lamb. You take the pencil from behind your ear and write the date in the book, though the ink in the pot has frozen solid, and the figures come out thin and wavering, but they are there.